The World Wide Web was released to the public 30 years ago. Feel old yet?
On April 30, 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web to the planet, free-of-charge.
The «collaborative information system» was used by the scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to communicate without delay across countries and continents, but deciding this tool was too useful to keep to themselves, the boffins over at CERN handed out the concept and code for everyone to use.
CERN wrote a letter on April 30 titled "Statement concerning CERN W3 software release into public domain,(opens in new tab)" (via The Register(opens in new tab)). It reads:
«The following CERN software is hereby put into the public domain:
»CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it."
There's a great interview with Walter Hoogland, former CERN director of research and co-signatory of the public domain release for the web, over on the CERN website(opens in new tab).
CERN actually went back and decided to keep the copyright for the World Wide Web for itself in later revisions of the web licence, choosing to instead release it under open source. It remains completely free and open to use.
The actual design of the World Wide Web came from scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, who nowadays is an advocate for ownership of personal data online(opens in new tab). The idea for the web at the time was to help CERN share information across different, often incompatible, software and hardware, and from vastly different points around the world. He wrote a program called ENQUIRE for this purpose in 1980, but it wouldn't be until he returned to CERN later in the same decade that he'd combine the
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